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Ubuntu's Already Making Plans For ARM In 2014, 2015

01-23-2012, 04:00 PM

Phoronix: Ubuntu's Already Making Plans For ARM In 2014, 2015

David Mandala of Canonical talked last week at Linux.Conf.Au 2012 about the history of Ubuntu Linux supporting the ARM architecture, what's coming up for Ubuntu ARM in the 12.04 LTS release, and even what's expected from Ubuntu on ARM as far out as 2015...

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Seriously why are they targeting beagleboard and such when the Raspberry Pi is right around the corner and will be much cheaper? Imo that thing should currently be the prime target for anything ARM-related.

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You didn't listen to the talk, did you? A lot more: armv7 & armv8, working on support for new hardware (custom kernel needed per device often), trying to get their say on Secure Boot in, and so on. Most is not Ubuntu-specific work but about linux on ARM in general.

Great work Ubuntu! Still wondering when we'll get ARM netbooks with a decent amount of RAM and CPU power, but never mind that.

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Seriously why are they targeting beagleboard and such when the Raspberry Pi is right around the corner and will be much cheaper? Imo that thing should currently be the prime target for anything ARM-related.

I wouldn't want to run a full fledged Ubuntu distro on such an outdated hardware with only 256MB of RAM.

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Seriously why are they targeting beagleboard and such when the Raspberry Pi is right around the corner and will be much cheaper? Imo that thing should currently be the prime target for anything ARM-related.

the simple answer is pi is made with the old arm11 not a current and far better cortex A9 or even A8 to keep costs down, that's a mistake in my eyes in 2012 as they would be far better with A9/NEON etc today helping teach the new generations of coders etc.

the thing is though only cortex A8 and A9 have the NEON SIMD core included, everything else including the PI arm11 do not,and that's bad.

NEON SIMD is what keeps apples OS above ARM linux today as they optimise all their libraries for NEON SIMD use just like they did for the PPC Altivec SIMD before it, the PPC Linux distro devs didn't care to learn that SIMD library optimisation lesson until it was to late, hopefully the ARM distro linux devs will not make the same mistakes again and will finally try and optimise everything they can for NEON SIMD use in due time.

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You didn't listen to the talk, did you? A lot more: armv7 & armv8, working on support for new hardware (custom kernel needed per device often), trying to get their say on Secure Boot in, and so on. Most is not Ubuntu-specific work but about linux on ARM in general.

Great work Ubuntu! Still wondering when we'll get ARM netbooks with a decent amount of RAM and CPU power, but never mind that.

you can always wait for the cheap freescale imx6 quad core boards/netbooks from freescale OEM's, imx6 efika etc but that could take a while to get made and actually available in retail, as the patches for that quad core are not even complete yet in the arm kernel code base http://www.spinics.net/lists/arm-kernel/threads.html , or you can just get a top priced Omap3 transformer for now.